The zones of time

Saturday 26 March 2021

On Sunday at 2:00 a.m., Britain switches to daylight saving time. What a relief.

I remember reading Dava Sobel's excellent slim book, Longitude, many years ago, and being struck by the part of the story that describes how time zones even came to be necessary when travel-- specifically, train travel--got speedy. Communication too; the telegraph, I think made it possible and sometimes necessary to know what time it was somewhere else.

I sometimes feel I live in three separate time zones: Eastern, Pacific, and Greenwich (or Universal, as it has come, somewhat pompously, to be known).

Toronto is on Eastern time, though not by much. Toronto really does have delusions of east-coastness, while in fact being much more both by geography and character a midwestern city. For part of February and much of March, I was on the west coast, in British Columbia and in California. 

Whistler while you ski...

Cold and sonny, UBC

Berkeley bounty

Point Reyes

Campanile, UCB

Add three hours to figure when to chat with husband and the offspring residing in Toronto. For two of my western weeks I was working, and trying, if not to keep to then at least to overlap with office hours. I became an early riser. Now that I am back east--in what passes for springtime in southern Ontario (just add snow)--I subtract three hours for conversations with son in Vancouver or parents in Los Angeles, or for some work meetings with lucky colleagues based in the west (which I maintain IS best).

While I have not visited the UK for more than two years, since (just) before the pandemic, I surround myself with it in other ways. I study Hebrew "there" and for much of the pandemic, I have attended a choir "there": Polina Shepherd's Sing With Me. I chat with family and friends there, carefully calculating time differences to avoid waking anyone up. I depend for much of my entertainment and news on the BBC. I like to listen to The Archers in real time, when possible, in order to join in with the 'tweetalong', a group of folks who possibly take this long-running radio soap opera a tad too much to heart. "Eccentric but not dangerous" is how one of our number described us. So, I add five hours from Toronto; eight from the west coast.

Mother-daughter outing
Victory Trailhead

There comes a twist in the tale though. A week into my western travels, daylight saving time took hold. I love this weekend every year, especially since moving to Canada (and even more since clocks became connected and change themselves automatically). Losing that hour is a small price for the harbinger of winter's close, even though experience has taught me that the end of a Toronto winter brings at least two months of an English-style winter before actual spring bursts forth. Here in Toronto, March brings us tentative snowdrops and struggling crocuses, species that emerged, bloomed, and faded in England months ago. Not until mid-April and May will we see here the bright heads of daffs and tulips. 

Crocus coming up

Snowdroplets

The trouble is that the UK, perhaps happy enough with its early floral bounty, holds out for several more weeks before bothering to switch its clocks. In the autumn, it's the reverse. The two continents do not align on switching back to standard time. Thus suddenly the difference is four hours between London and Toronto and nine hours if you're in LA. No, wait. Seven hours. It's so confusing. I resort to counting on my fingers (or checking the 'world clock' app on my phone). I like to think that I am fairly decent at arithmetic-- I was in an honors maths program and took both calculus and statistics at university--but I find that as soon as numbers are attached either to time or money, my brain shuts down.

So, it has been a struggle, this time zone business. There are many things I would change in the world if I could. Most of them are a lot bigger and more important than my puny struggles to add and subtract hours. The war in Ukraine and the anathema of Putin. The ongoing uncertain landscape of the covid pandemic. The inability of the Academy Awards to run smoothly and peacefully. Even so, if I could humbly request that the UK and North America agree to change their clocks on the same days, twice a year, I would be very grateful for a positive reply.  

And Putin, begone. To a place beyond timezones.

Higher Resolution

My usual New Year's resolution is to make no New Year's resolutions, or at least none that require me to do make an effort. In the distant past I would resolve to make drastic changes in my character; for instance, to always be on time. (Given that today is January 26 and I am only just considering New Year's resolutions, it is safe to call that one a failure.) I learned to reach for lower-hanging fruit. I'm happy to resolve, say, to read more books. Piece of cake. My sister once resolved to drink more water. We were at a family New Year's Eve dinner in Santa Barbara, going round the table sharing our resolutions, and that was hers. I took note and used it the following year. It must have worked, because not long afterward my mother complimented my husband and me. "I really admire how much water you drink," she told us. We thanked her. Another piece of cake, so to speak. (Coffee with that?)

But this year, I'm tempted to try again, and try harder (even if later). It is not exactly an attempt at a character overhaul; it is more a matter of changing work habits. I am still thinking back to my wonderful writing residency at the Wassaic Project in November [https://transatlantictravails.blogspot.com/2021/11/from-window-number-3-to-studio-number-6.html] and comprehending how special was the ability--the mandate--to focus on just one thing, the writing project I've titled Asking After Alice. Sticking to one thing is very much not my normal life. It is not the normal life of any adult that I know. Normal life for me involves constant switching between work, household management, chores, parenting, pet-owning, writing, and leisure, with multiple items under each of those headings. I may be forgetting something. Self-care? Yes, that's it. Or maybe self-care is filed under 'leisure'. 

I don't want to give up any of it (well, maybe cleaning the cat litter). Even doing the washing up is kind of fun, since we all do it together, minus the person whose night it was to cook the meal. (It turns out, by the way, that I have been doing the dishes wrong, all wrong, according to my children. They are the experts. I don't argue.) 

But I yearn toward time management solutions. I no more than start one task than my phone alarm tells me it is time to begin another. I scribbled down little lists and schedules every day. By the time I've written one out, I am already off-course, although I will nonetheless do it again tomorrow a true expression of hope triumphing over experience. Sticking to a schedule is not one of my skills. I feel swamped by time and its passage, am surprised at the end of each and every day how little of it I have captured. And, too, I am surprised at how surprised I am. 

I have studied various time-management tricks and try to perform them, like our dog learning to roll over to earn treats. But I get endlessly distracted. Just now, in the midst of a sentence, I found myself peering out the window to watch a truck deposit a dumpster across the street (a complicated maneuver with all the snow).

My latest effort is inspired by author Karma Brown's The 4% Fix. Ms. Brown points out that one hour is 4% of a day. This feat of calculation is not the main thrust of Brown's book, which instead is about what can be accomplished by putting that hour to work (writing a book, for instance). But the bigger takeaway for me was something else to do with 'four': the focused four. Choose 4 tasks a day to accomplish, Brown advises. Focus. She echoes Susan, my supervisor and friend, whose mantra to her students is 'Focus and Finish'. 

I can do that, I thought. Four tasks. How difficult can it be to get four things done in a day? I found a tiny notepad in which to pen my four daily tasks. But, like time, I find it difficult to manage. Maybe I needed more space. A bigger notepad. A longer day. 

And there is the rub. Or as my high-school French teacher used to say: voilà  le hic. You just get those 24 hours. No more.

How to cultivate a shorter focal length? A higher resolution? To focus and finish. To bring the lessons of the residency back here to my residence. But first, I think, a quick game of Wordle. And then a fresh cup of tea, if the cat allows me access to the water jug.

What was I saying? Oh, right. Right. Yes. Focus and fi

Wordle 220 4/6

🟩⬜🟨🟨⬜

🟩⬜🟨🟩⬜

🟩⬜⬜🟩🟩

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

PS Favorite Twitter catch from last week: @alexhanna writes "I have a feeling the next variant will be transmissible via Zoom."  Response from @Barmijo: "Well Teams will still be safe. Nothing transmits well via Teams." That is my experience too--apologies to friends and family who work for Microsoft! :) 

I Come in Peace

I have been saying for the past few years that once I achieved Canadian citizenship, I would no longer need to post in this blog. (Also, I hoped someone would come up with a better word than 'blog'.) The point of starting it had been efficiently to update friends and family on my transition to this new world, and the motivation for maintaining it included both the fun of writing about what I noticed in this long-drawn-out transition period, and the mental health benefits to myself of carping about what I noticed in this long-drawn-out transition period.

But here I am, a bona-fide card-carrying Canadian citizen, and still writing.

Perhaps the mental health benefits accruing to me now are those necessary to counter the ongoing impact of the pandemic. Omicronitis, we can call it. Here in what Theo Moudakis, my favourite of the Toronto Star editorial cartoonists, labelled OmicrOntario, we are again locked down this month: gyms, indoor dining, theatre, cinema, all closed. Limits on gatherings and customer capacity. Schools and university courses (most of them) are online. It's like 2021 all over again, with added vaccinations. By a combination of luck (husband's and mine) and intrepidity (daughter's) all five of us are now triple-vaxxed. We are grateful, but still wary,  trying to live defensively. Socializing occurs online or outdoors--in below-freezing weather: locked down by winter and by pandemic.

Crossing the border from the US to Canada in early December, just ahead of the omicron 'tsunami', I used my new Canadian passport. It was, I have to say, an unanticipated thrill. I drove over the Peace Bridge from Buffalo, NY to Fort Erie, Ontario, after a long day's drive from Manhattan. My PCR covid test results had reached me in the nick of time--negative, although I had been living fast and loose in those post-vaccinated, pre-omicron, halcyon days--eating with friends! Going to museums!--and I had the screenshot ready to show on my phone. It was early evening on a Thursday, and there was no queue. I rolled down my window and greeted the Canadian immigration agent with enthusiasm, which seemed to surprise him.  I brandished my passport. "This is my first time entering Canada as a citizen," I told him. "Would you give me a stamp?"

"We don't usually do that with Canadian or US passports," he said, and asked me the usual questions. Where had I been, why had I gone, where did I live.

"But it's my first time," I reminded him, boldly.

"Do you have a PCR test to show me?" 

I did. He examined the screenshot and perused my passport. Then he looked at his own computer. "Did you complete the ArriveCan information?"

Uh-oh. I had not. Although we had managed the procedure only a couple of months earlier, in August, to return to Toronto from Los Angeles, I had entirely forgotten to fill out this electronic paperwork now necessary to enter Canada (possibly because the 'we' who had done all the work in August had been my husband and my younger son). "Whoops. No," I told him, now meek. "I'm sorry."

"Oh well," he said generously. "It's fine. I'll let it slide this time. Why don't you give me your phone number?" I wasn't going to argue even if it seemed a little odd. 

So I did. When he gave me back my passport, it had been stamped. A fair trade.

To misquote Fay Wray, though, he hasn't called, he hasn't written...

My first time

Embracing the winter

Niagara Glen

Toronto

Niagara River, Whirlpool Beach

Puzzling

From Window Number 3 to Studio Number 6: Passport to Creativity

Wassaic Project HQ: Maxon Mill

I am spending November in Wassaic, New York ("Home of the First Borden Condensed Milk Factory"). Wassaic is a self-proclaimed hamlet nestled at the foot of the Taconics, a stretch of low mountains that stitch eastern New York to western Connecticut and Massachusetts. New England, effectively. I am a Winter Resident at the Wassaic Project. The place is beautiful; the whole idea is beautiful. I have 3.5 weeks to spend writing. Almost a whole month! I have a studio, a shared house, and no responsibilities to anyone other than myself. Well, I did make a plan with my housemate to cook some stir-fry veggies with rice. But otherwise, it's just me and my laptop and some index cards, the odd happy hour gathering, a  yoga class, a brief presentation, studio visits...a dream come true. 

I don't fully believe I got here. My original plan--to attend in October 2020--was covid-cancelled. This year, too, there were obstacles: getting the right travel documents, a negative covid test, updated car registration, leaving home. The travel documentation was a close-run thing. I knew I could cross into the US with no problem--I may be a new Canadian, but I am still an old American, with a valid passport to prove it--but getting back home to Toronto might prove problematic. Ironically, becoming a Canadian citizen last month made me a captive in the country. Part of being sworn in required that we chop up, on screen, our permanent residency cards, which had for 8 years allowed us legally to re-enter Canada. In fact one of the instructions about preparing for the event read, "Bring a strong pair of scissors." We did. Red-handled ones. 

"You don't need to travel anytime soon?" asked Christine, our citizenship doula, when we joined her on-screen, nervous and eager. "It will take two to four weeks to received your citizenship certificate. Then you can apply for a passport."

"I do," I said, and explained about the residency, less than three weeks hence.

"You can postpone the ceremony, if you prefer," she offered. 

No, I said. No. We had waited too long, and I could not bear the thought of standing on the sidelines watching the rest of the family become Canadian without me. Well then, said Christine, write a note along with your signed form explaining why you need to receive your certificate quickly.

I did that. I described the Wassaic Project and my heartfelt desire to be here. I could see that it did not exactly come under the heading of hardship: please, let me go away for a month to write without the distraction of home and hearth. But miraculously, my note did the trick. Perhaps that's something special about Canada, accepting that the urge to creativity can in fact be urgent. Within four days I had my certificate, with which I could request a speedy in-person passport appointment. First I had to request a phone call.

"Oh, dear, there are none available until the middle of next month," said the woman on the end of phone, worry in her voice. It was Tuesday. "Not even in Kitchener." I have been to Kitchener and had no desire to go back, but I would if it meant getting a passport quickly.

I explained to her about the writing residency. "You see, I will have almost a month to work on my project," I told her. "It's really important to me."

"Oh yes, I do see, my dear." We had achieved a 'my dear' relationship; I relaxed. "Let me send them a special request. Let's hope they will see you." I was not sure who They were, but I had confidence in my interlocutor now. 

Within five minutes of hanging up, Someone More Official called and told me to bring my application to the downtown Toronto office on Thursday at 2:45. I was not being sent to Kitchener.

I rode my bike to the appointment and stood at Window Number 3. The man on the other side of the plexiglass (in the U.S. consulate it is bullet-proof glass) complimented my hummingbird backpack. He took my application and my money. "Can you come pick up your passport on Monday?" he enquired.

I told him it would be a pleasure. And it was. 

Passport in hand, negative covid test achieved, car serviced and its lapsed registration updated, I headed to New York. To the Wassaic Project.

I have never 'done' a residency before, unlike most or perhaps all of my seven co-residents. I'm the oldest by far and yet the newest at this artist business. At the Wassaic Project there are no demands, plenty of space, lots of opportunities. Social intercourse without social pressure. Yesterday I toured the woodworking and metalworking shop in a big old unheated barn, full of loud scary machines. I have no intention of touching any of them, but you never know; I might write about them (especially if I take up the horror genre). 

View from the barn

A friend messaged asking if I were allowed to read during the retreat. I am. I am allowed to read, write, roam, run, ride, tack index cards right onto the walls of my studio. I have a studio. It is Number 6. The other residents here are all visual artists: painters, sculptors, workers in miscellaneous materials; I am the lone writer. I notice them wandering around the barn and the converted mill which houses the heart of the operation, fingering bits of wood and twisted wire with a strange gleam in their eyes. They seem much more at home occupying space and taking advantage of resources.

Studio Number 6

I am learning from them. Yesterday I commandeered a spare table on which to lay out index cards. I checked with Will, the project director, about it.

"Of course!" he replied.

He's the one who told me to stick push-pins into the walls. And I will. I just need a day or two to really get into the spirit of the thing. I had better hurry, though. There are only 20 days left. 

The library

Today's writing station: insanely warm. Have swapped sweater for sunhat. 

Give her a centimeter: turning Canadian

Eli and the flag, turning Canadian, May.

The Toronto crew and the judge, turning Canadian, October.

So, we are all Canadians. All five of us. Eldest child got there first, turning Canadian in May of this year, in Vancouver. The western Canada immigration office works more quickly than the eastern one, it seems.

But on Monday, the other four of us caught up. We received emails telling us we had been approved for citizenship and that we needed to turn up remotely, via Zoom, to attend our ceremony and take our oaths. I have now sworn fealty to Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada. There is no comma in the text version of the oath we received, but we are fairly sure that one belongs. Although, as middle child points out, it is correct with or without the punctuation. Elizabeth II is in fact the second queen of Canada, Victoria being the first. 

I jest; but I was moved. I even shed a few tears. We were encouraged to decorate our Zoom tiles with red and white Canadiana; I wore a red sweater (from local clothing maker Terra Cotta) and white camisole peeping out (très chic). Off-screen, I wore my Good American jeans. Son wore a smart red button-down shirt and daughter a white blouse. She also painted her nails red and white. I grabbed the tiny Canadian flag that lives in our kitchen pencil holder. We were completely outdone, however, by the occupants of many other Zoom tiles, who had tacked enormous flags to their walls. A little girl wore a red-and-white bow in her hair. This accoutrement sailed a bit close to the wind, as we had been informed that we could wear religious headgear, but not 'casual hats'. No specific mention of bows, however.

We recited the oath in unison, unmuted, right hands raised. "Number 25, is that your right hand?" The judge inquired. "Number 31, please move your hand away from your face." They checked to see that we repeated the words aloud and correctly. Husband maintains however that Number 31, an older gentleman, did not speak at all. Or perhaps it was 25. 

After saying the oath in English, repeating each phrase after the judge, we recited it in French. "I know it's an unfamiliar language to many of you, but let's give it a try," he said. I don't know about everyone else, but the judge did a fine job of pronouncing the words.

And then we sang the national anthem, O Canada. I know all the words (in English) from the many days of standing stock-still in the corridor of the elementary school, Huron Street, after arriving late with daughter and needing to get her a late slip from the office. But no one in the office would help us until the strains of the national anthem, cast over the PA system, had faded away. So I began to sing along. Daughter cringed. She was very happy when, in Grade 5, her father took over the task of walking her to school. He never learned the song. The two of them arrived on time.

I like the melody, and I even like most of the words. It's oddly constructed, though, this song; like The Star-Spangled Banner, it is exhortatory and in the second-person, addressing the nation itself. (Perhaps all anthems are thus?) A few phrases in particular grated: "True patriot love/ in all thy sons command." Sons? Sons? What about daughters? Or the un-gendered? Also, "O Canada, our home and native land." I hoped that someday I would be a citizen (someday sooner than this) but it would never be my native land, nor my children's or husband's. In fact that is true for about half the Canadians in Toronto. Also, 'native'. Really? The connotation makes me cringe. Surely there's a better adjective. And finally, there's the line "God keep our land/ glorious and free..." Again. God? Canada, unlike the UK, does not have a state religion--though it does publicly fund Catholic schools in the eastern provinces, which annoys me no end. I queried it once, all unknowing, at a school trustee's meeting and generated vitriolic responses. 

Fortunately, enough other people found the 'sons' line problematic, and the anthem was officially changed to "True patriot love/in all of us command." Still a little mushy for my test, but at least equal-opportunity mushiness. 

So now what remains to be altered are 'native' and 'God'. I shall argue for 'our home and treasured land'. It conjures chests of gold and X marks the spot, perhaps, but what's wrong with that? Finally, I wonder if we can get rid of God and replace it with 'We shall keep our land/ glorious and free'. I think 'we shall' has a nice declarative ring to it, far better than a whiny plea to a dubious deity.

Yes, give me an inch, or a centimeter, and I'll certainly go for the whole kilometer. I hesitated to speak up on this issue when I was not even a citizen of the country. Now I am. Next maybe I'll take on the state funding of Catholic schools. What could possibly go wrong?

Poutine!

A Pandemic Proposal: International Travel as a New Olympic Sport

In December of 2019 our extended family--my parents, my sisters, our husbands and our children--gathered in Mexico to celebrate my father's 90th birthday. It was a gala occasion, a week of being together and enjoying sea, sand, and sunshine. When I hugged my parents goodbye it was with the promise that I would return to see them in a few month. March 12th. 

I did not. Essential travel only. We had some of that in our family and managed it as safely as possible, and stayed well. Seeing my parents could wait, or so I hoped.

Nearly nineteen viral months after that farewell, I returned. There had been several 'almosts' but each time something--family issues, climbing case counts, imminence of vaccination, confused government edicts, my previously-untapped ability to not travel--served to postpone the making of plans. How to measure the essence of 'essential'? I watched others travel, by car, by plane, within countries, across borders. They managed it. 

Then came my mother's 90th birthday, earlier this month. It felt essential to be there. Essential, and possible to manage safely.

And lo, it was possible. We did manage it. We jumped through numerous hoops and surmounted a variety of hurdles. In fact, as we sneaked peaks at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, it occurred to me that international air travel could almost be entered as a new Olympic event. 

We all got there, my whole family along with elder son's plus-one. We arrived in Woodland Hills, California two by two: my daughter and I went first. In the ever-changing landscape of government rules and edicts about crossing borders, information was as difficult to pin down as liquid mercury. 

The Air Canada website said we had to have a PCR test (that's the expensive one). The US immigration website said "PCR or antigen". Essential travel only, said a newspaper article. "US/Canada Border Re-Opening," Twitter chirped. "No one even asked me why I was going," reported someone who had recently driven across the Peace Bridge into Buffalo. Could my husband join me (non-American, holder of a British passport and Canadian permanent resident card)? Good question. Fully vaccinated--but with Astra Zeneca? Multiple types of vaccine? Shrug. I called Air Canada. No one at home to answer the phone. 

I turned to friends--mostly Americans--for their experiences. "How was it for you?" I asked several who had made the experiment at various points. Fine, they all said, but I could find no one doing what we were trying: flying rather than driving, a mixed bag of Americans and non-Americans, in a month without an R in it. So many variables. So many sources of data. So much disagreement.  A lot of shrugging.

So, full of trepidation, armed with certificates of vaccination and negative test results (antigen; the pharmacy said that's what everyone else was having, whoever and wherever those everyones were now), daughter and I, in the vanguard of our family expedition, trekked to the airport. My jittering nerves could have powered a small country. 

We sailed through security and approached Passport Control at Toronto's Pearson Airport, where US Immigration and Customs do their thing. The uniformed agent smiled at us--at least, his eyes did, above his mask. He waved us through. Welcome home, he seemed to say. We boarded the plane and found our seats, near the back where not many people had to pass by. For a long while the aisle seat in our row remained empty and I allowed myself to hope but then a young man, a perfectly decent and clean one, sat next to us. I was glad my mask (KN95, fitting snugly, thank you very much) covered my inadvertent glare. I was not glad, however, to see that his mask rested below his nose.

"Please, can you put your mask on fully?" I asked.

"Of course. Sorry." He complied. "Are you vaccinated?"

"I am, but we still need masks on."

"Of course," he nodded. "What vaccine?"

I wanted not to be facing this nice young man, not be chatting with him, not, of all things, to be discussing vaccination. "Astra Zeneca." It felt like a confession and I kicked myself for getting drawn in this way. I took the offensive. "What about you? Are you fully vaccinated?"

"Getting there," he said vaguely and alarmingly, his mask slipping down a little. What? I thought, drawing as far away from him as I possibly could. "What do you think about this mixing of vaccines?" he asked me.

"I think it's fine," I stuttered. "Whatever vaccine you can get, you should take."

He shook his head, murmured something in a tone of doubt, and took a phone call, pulling his mask up over his nose again. Daughter and I exchanged glances. The man disconnected and waved his phone in front of me. "And what do you think of this?" he asked me. I saw a screen full of brightly colored stiletto-heeled shoes.

"Uh. Shoes," I replied, stupidly.

"Not the shoes," he said with a touch of impatience. "Look. It's a shoe organizer." Indeed it was. "It's my product," he added. I saw a transparent acrylic board with narrow holes along its width and length; a pencil-thin high heel had been inserted into each one. It was in a way beautiful, like a Mondrian painting, and also the most useless object I could imagine. I surrendered to the inevitable. I would have to speak truth to Y-chromosome.

"Look," I said. "I'm pretty nervous about this trip. I don't think I can have this conversation any more. Sorry." 

"I'm making you uncomfortable," he said. "I'll move to another seat." 

Instant guilt. "Oh, no, you don't have to do that. I just can't make small talk right now." The guilt was compounded by the fact that the man and I belonged to different visible ethnicities. "Please don't move because of me."

But he did move. As I saw a little later he had found a seat with no neighbor where he could sprawl his not-fully-vaccinated self in comfort. Meanwhile, daughter and I had our row to ourselves now and watched Gilmore Girls in masked semi-privacy. Win-win (except for the guilt). 

Time passes quickly when you are watching trashy sitcoms with your teenage daughter, and we landed without incident--and after a car-service ride across the Santa Monica Mountains, I was reunited at last with my parents. Calloo, callay! 

More hurdles however remained. We were reunited, true, and under the same roof--but still physically distanced and masked for three awkward days. We stayed outdoors as much as possible. Antigen self-testing kits were procured from the drugstore and after 72 hours we hooked up our phones to our nasal passages by means of swabs and an app, and got the all-clear. At last: hugs! Touch! Dinner indoors! 

The other two pairs in our party arrived: first, elder son and girlfriend coming from Vancouver, followed two days later by husband and younger son; there was some truck with US immigration in one case, successfully surmounted, and a flight delay for the other pair. More masking, more separating, more testing, and then, blissfully, reunion. Hugging.

The visit was amazing. I am not sure I have ever appreciated a trip 'home' as much as this one. Maybe  my first return to LA after leaving for university decades (and decades) ago had a similar emotional impact. I marveled that everything was still the same--road signs, stores, office buildings--as my mother drove me home from Hollywood-Burbank airport. "You really should have achieved object permanence by now," I recall my mother saying with a slight frown. 

This visit, it was people, rather than things, that I marveled to see again. I woke up every morning with an urge to pinch myself just so as to believe I was really truly there, in my childhood bedroom, my parents next door, my family around me. Over the course of almost 4 weeks, I saw my sisters and nieces and nephews and brothers-in-law and some cousins and friends. I met in real life a new 'pandemic pal' who to me had only ever been the size of a tiny Zoom tile. 

With my family I swam and hiked and beachcombed and went running and rode bikes and clambered in caves and visited Hollywood's Walk of Fame for the first time in decades. We went to Muscle Beach. Some of us rambled around the Getty Center. We took silly photos. We swam in the sea and in swimming pools. Daughter took a Red Cross lifesaving course and made her own new friends. Son's girlfriend and niece's boyfriend joined in the family events and seem to have survived unscathed--kudos to them! Younger son had some driving lessons with his grandfather. 

I feasted my eyes on the landscape of the southwest, the jagged coastal range, the crumbly inland one, the ocean, the canyons, the cactus and the palms. The dry scents of sage and pine and eucalyptus and juniper and sandstone dust. The stunning western sunsets over ocean and chaparral. 

Our homeward travel involved more paperwork, more testing (and more expensive testing), and of course more packing. But it all worked in the end. And now we are back in our home(s), getting ready for our next chapters.  

Glut of miscellaneous photos:

The Piano Men

 

Farewell.

Long ago and far away, our middle child decided he wanted to learn the piano. He was about seven at the time, and one of his favourite schoolteachers, Mrs. Jay, offered lessons. We thought about it. There was space for a small piano in our square front room in Hove, in East Sussex, with its bay window overlooking a garden whose centerpiece was an enormous and brilliant fuchsia hedge. The room possessed a door that could be closed. Perfect. Now to find an affordable, available instrument.

One day soon afterward, wandering along nearby Portland Road, I spotted a piano of exactly the right size and constructed of a pretty dark polished wood. It sat on the pavement next to other items all apparently for sale, outside a narrow frontage labelled 'Furniture Removals'. I scribbled down the phone number. Poor orphaned piano. Over the keyboard an inscription in gold lettering read "Berry and Co., London, 1954." 

That night I discussed it with husband. "Let's see how much they want," he proposed. The hour was late, but being full of zeal I thought that at least I could leave a message on the office answering machine to indicate my interest before the hordes descended. I dialed. 

"Hello?" queried a sleepy voice. Eek. I checked the time: half-past midnight.

"I'm sorry," I stuttered, glad to have an American accent. In cases where I did something stupid like this, it generally got blamed on my nationality rather than myself. "I thought this was an office number. I'll ring back in the morning."

"Nah, love, you're all right. What is it I can do for you?" The erstwhile sleeper struggled to sound awake. I thought I might as well make it worth his while to have been roused.

"It's that piano on the pavement in Portland Road. I saw it earlier today and thought I might want it. How much are you asking?"

"Would you be wanting delivery, too?" the man asked.

"Yes, I guess so." The thing was small but definitely too big for our Renault people-mover.   

It's..." I almost heard wheels spinning in his sleepy head. "Seventy-five quid, with the delivering."

"Seventy-five pounds?" I thought I must have misheard. Pianos should cost more than that.

"Well, well, let's see. Where do you live?" I named our road, Amesbury Crescent, and he said, "Why, that's no distance. We can do that for seventy."

"Thank you. I appreciate it."

"Will it be going to the ground floor or higher?"

"Ground floor."

"In that case, I can bring it down to sixty-five."

"Wonderful."

"Front or back?"

"Front."

"Sixty, then. Any stairs?"

"No, just a doorstep."

"We can do that for fifty-five all in, if you're paying cash. When do you want it?"

We settled a time and I disconnected before the man started offering me money rather than vice versa. 

Hindsight is so wonderful. I ought to have known by then the way the world works: everything comes at a price. This piano would, one day, make us pay. 

But back then, in England, I woke in the morning thrilled by the prospect of a piano in the house, and hoping the man remembered our deal and not believe it to have been a dream, or perhaps a nightmare. Sure enough, that afternoon, two men in a van arrived and heaved the piano up our narrow walk, over the small hurdle of the doorstep, and deposited it in the front room with its bay window and view of the fuchsia. We placed it away from the party wall so as to minimize the noise percolating to our lovely semi-detached neighbors. (Also we did not want to clash with their son's saxophone playing, which came through the wall the other direction.)  I handed over the dosh. 

Younger son enjoyed his lessons with Mrs. Jay very much and did not require all that much nagging to put in practice time. A couple of years later, his little sister joined him as a pupil of Mrs. Jay. Even the eldest child, who played violin, got some benefit: he used the rack of the piano to hold his sheet music.

When we moved to Toronto in 2010, the piano (and the cat, and almost everything else not nailed down) crossed the Atlantic with us (though not, unfortunately, Mrs. Jay). The piano fit well into our front room in Harbord Street; the cat liked to perch on top of it; both served as comforting reminders of 'home' over the long months and years of adjustment. We found a teacher for the kids and a tuner for the instrument, who admired the piano's body, shook his head a little over the state of its insides, told us one or two keys could not be made true, and warned that it might survive only a few more tunings. Look for another piano, he advised. A year later the University's Faculty Club decided to replace its upright piano with a baby grand, and for $150--the cost of transporting it--their old one became ours. But we could not bring ourselves to part with Berry & Co., so now we had two pianos side by side in our front room. The children might play duets, I thought.  (They did. Once.)

Two years later, booted out of our rental home, we and our possessions--two pianos, two cats, a dog, and multiple van-loads of other items--moved 700 meters away to Brunswick Avenue. The instruments did not fit side by side in this house's smaller front room, so one got relegated to a different space that we foolishly began calling the music room. No more duets. 

The 'extra' piano occupied space that was better suited to a large, comfy sofa. When we finally acquired one (thanks, Maggie and Kyle!) we knew the Berry and Co. piano needed to leave. We tried to give it away. No go. We managed to shove it out the front door as far as the porch, but the stretch of six steps down to street level defeated us. And so the piano sat there, covered by an olive-drab tarp, for two years, an ugly hulk occupying a chunk of our scarce outdoor space. "Why do you keep your barbecue at the front of the house?" visitors asked sometime. Vainly we wished someone would steal it. The cost of hauling it away seemed prohibitive. It languished. So did we.

Then something happened. I'm not sure what. The approach of a second pandemic summer, maybe. We had spent much of summer 2020 on our front porch, working, eating, having safely-distant chats with passing neighbors. This summer of 2021 held promise of moving on and yet here the tarp-clad piano loomed, blocking us in. It did not match up.

So I found a company called 'Just Junk' and they appeared the next day, two agreeable young men who gave us a discount on their fees because the piano was already outside. "I'm impressed you got it this far," said the driver. We were humble and grateful. Nonetheless, the cost was eye-watering. "It's not easy disposing of a piano," the man said. Tell me about it.

They worked quickly, efficiently, and irrevocably. Thunk, thunk, thunk, and into the back of their specially-equipped van. 

The cost to be rid of it, accounting for passage of time and change of currency, amounted to about four times what it had to acquire it. I wish I could find the removal man in Portland Road, Hove, and let him know. 

Farewell, O piano. The end of an era. We do still have the other one, unplayed, shoved into a corner of that ill-named music room, which now also holds a small convertible sofa and a mini-trampoline and the wi-fi router, which perches atop the piano. The cats now prefer the couch.

Thunk.

Just Junk.